Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia, 100. London; New York: Routledge, 2015. xiii, 204 pp. US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-71905-6.
The 1957 poster “Methods of Prevention” on this book’s cover page presents three distinct scenes: left of the open door a male doctor takes notes as he talks with a patient; to the right a female nurse gives a bottle of medicine to an elderly woman sitting in a row with others; in the forefront, a young woman looks through a microscope at a desk where three slides lay ready for her to examine. As part of the Science and Technology Popularization Association of Zhejiang Province, the Shanghai Health Press published this poster five years into the Patriotic Health Movement that began in response to allegations of US germ warfare during the Korean War (1950–1953). It visually captures the two core themes that course through this edited volume: 1) how public health was a central aspect of national reconstruction in postwar Asia (i.e., the rural clinic was a central part of Chinese nation building); and 2) how international influences were locally transformed (i.e., the microscope and smear slides, both part of disease eradication programs, represent modern Western science).
The co-editors Ka-che Yip and Liping Bu’s earlier collaboration (with Darwin H. Stapleton) on the history of public health in pre-1950 Asia, Science, Public Health and the State in Modern Asia(2010), inspired this collection’s focus on postwar Asia. One of the authors in this volume, Akihito Suzuki, co-authored Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945–52: Alien Prescriptions(2012). All three books were published within five years of each other in the same Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia series (#71, #73, #100). This indicates that since the series started in 1997 the history of public health has finally become one of the central themes of the “Modern History of Asia.”
The opening chapter “National Health, International Interests” serves as an entry point into the co-editors’ main argument that one of the most important developments in postwar Asian nations was the reconstruction, or rebuilding, of public health systems within the framework of new international public health institutions and Cold War politics. They also show how the political changes in the postwar period (decolonization, revolution, and national reconstruction) connected with these public health projects, effectively setting the stage for integrating Asian public health history into modern world history.
The introduction ends with a summary of each of the nine case studies, showing how the goals of national public health and nation building locally transformed those of international institutions in distinctly different ways. The coeditors did not write a separate conclusion. Nor did the separate contributors cross-reference their articles well. One is thus left with a sense that this book is not yet greater than the sum of its chapters. Nonetheless, the separate contributions remain well worth reading for the illuminating public health case studies as well as informative 30- to 60-year public health histories that they offer of a range of East Asian (mainland China, South and North Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong), Southeast Asian (Indonesia and Thailand), and South Asian (India) countries.
The two co-editors contributed several-decade-long surveys of a particular public health topic. Ka-che Yip traces a change toward more proactive interventionist British public health policy in Hong Kong from 1945 to 1985 in response to lowered British prestige, discontent among the Chinese subjects, and the rise in Chinese communism in a new postwar political context. Liping Bu examines how from 1950 to 1980 the Patriotic Health Movement developed in response to the US involvement in the Korean War, relied on Soviet models, and contributed to China’s Socialist reconstruction. Xiaoping Fang’s “Diseases, Peasants, and Nation-Building in Rural China” moves from national-level health policies to the many roles beyond patient health care that mass-line disease eradication and prevention programs played in integrating rural China into the Chinese nation-state. Gao Xi’s case study on the “Pavlovian Influence on Chinese Medicine, 1950s” returns to the Soviet influence on Chinese public health theme introduced in Bu’s chapter.
The second half of the book moves to other countries in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and India. Shin Dong-won’s “Public Health and People’s Health” compares the different public health histories of South and North Korea in the immediate postwar period from 1945 to 1960 in which Cold War politics played out in contrasting socialist (N. Korea) and capitalist (S. Korea) approaches to public health. Kazumi Noguchi then examines the “Impact of Government-Foundation Cooperation” on the development of the postwar Japanese health-care system. Shirish R. Kavadi’s essay moves the reader’s gaze over to India by studying different visions of the relationship between “Medicine, Philanthropy, and Nationhood.” Vivek Neelakantan’s study of public health in Indonesia focuses on the WHO’s “Campaign Against the Big Four Endemic Diseases” during the 1950s. Finally, Davisakd Puaksom concludes the volume with a chapter “On the Politics of Health Care an Moral Discourse in Thailand, 1950–2010.” Together these final three chapters offer insights into little-known areas of public health history in South and Southeast Asia.
Because this edited volume’s intention was to provide a range of new public health history scholarship on postwar Asia, this is not yet the “history of public health in East Asia” book that I still seek to assign in my undergraduate course of the same title. Nevertheless I will draw on the rich material in chapters 2 through 7 for my lectures as well as assign some of the chapters. I thus recommend historians of modern world history, public health history, and, especially, the modern history of Asia, to do the same in their own courses. Historians of public health in the post-World War II period, anywhere in the world, would also find much to think about in this volume’s interesting range of contributions on modern Asian public health history.
Marta E. Hanson
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
pp. 620-622